


A Comic Book Vision of the Future

by nikkilittle



Category: American McGee's Alice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 18:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15690888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikkilittle/pseuds/nikkilittle
Summary: The first chapter of "Wastelands." Works as a stand-alone piece of science fiction. In 2032, Alice is drifting through the ruins of Detroit.  And thinking about revolution. Alternate Universe: a modern American Alice in a real Wonderland.The entire "Wastelands" appears in the "Princess of Thieves" series.





	A Comic Book Vision of the Future

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." --George Orwell

Chapter 1: "The Ruins"

I felt like a damn gargoyle sitting up there. Or maybe the vampire Selene from all those "Underworld" movies. Spread out below me from the window ledge of the abandoned hotel was most of Detroit. The city was a wasteland. There was no other way to describe it. Square mile after square mile of abandoned buildings. Abandoned factories in the industrial zones with weeds growing up through the cracks of empty parking lots. Abandoned skyscrapers in the financial district with their broken windows and ornate revolving doors. The abandoned homes in the residential areas were the spookiest. Half of the homes looked like sure bets to be haunted.

Detroit had no city government. No public services. No police. No fire department. There was no electricity, no water, no sewage. Not a single toilet in the city flushed. The city was so empty that even most of the rats had left. The nearest hospital was more than fifty miles away. Yet there were people here. Inhabiting the upper floors of some of the apartment buildings were squatters. They would catch rainwater in large plastic tubs arrayed on the roofs of the buildings. They grew vegetables in any green spaces nearby. Potatoes, turnips, radishes, and sweet potatoes seemed to be the most common. I saw sorghum growing in some of the larger green spaces. I had learned to appreciate sorghum "popcorn" that was offered to me in homeless encampments throughout the midwest.

The only thing positive I could think of to say about Detroit was that there was nobody there to collect rent. It had been twenty-five years since I had kidnapped the U.S. Senate. The kidnapping had accomplished nothing. Now in 2032, the population had dropped to about 280 million. There had been a die-off among the poor thanks to lack of medical treatment. Medicaid had been cut so many times that the Republicans finally killed it off entirely with little fanfare. Medicare had been replaced with a voucher program that paid for so little that only the upper middle class folk got any benefit. The legal requirement for public hospitals to treat anyone who showed up in the emergency rooms regardless of ability to pay had been eliminated. If you didn't have an insurance card, the public hospitals would let you die in the emergency room. Most hospitals were run by private for-profit medical practices which required all treatments to be preapproved by the insurance companies. The private hospitals were even worse than the public hospitals. If you didn't have insurance, they wouldn't even let you bleed to death in the emergency room: they threw you out onto the sidewalk. The only place left to go was the few remaining Catholic hospitals which were found usually only in a state's largest city. The Catholic Church had struggled to keep at least one hospital open in each state. On the front edifice of every Catholic hospital was the following engraved in bronze: "This hospital treats everyone who enters our doors. None shall be turned away." Since the sex scandals had bankrupted every Catholic parish in the country, there wasn't a single Catholic church open in the entire country. There were a few Catholic school systems remaining in New England. That was about it. The Catholic hospitals were the only remaining presence of Catholicism in most areas of the U.S.

After I had pitched the Angel's Sword into the Capitol Building, the U.S. government moved entirely underground into a bunker that had been built during the "Cold War" with the Soviet Union. The cowards had remained there ever since. There was reputed to be a single way in and out of the bunker, but no one in the public knew where it was. All I needed was one photograph, one YouTube video to create a portal into the bunker. I had been pleading for one for years in YouTube videos, but apparently the underground bunker was so tightly policed that carrying a cell phone inside was certain death. The location of the United States government bunker was the most tightly-held secret on Earth. The Angel's Sword was still stuck in the rock of the remnants of the Capitol Building, its blade still alight. There were sharpshooters located everywhere around it in case I decided to try to retrieve it. People in the homeless encampments had been warning me for years that there were also mines located in the soil within ten feet of the Angel's Sword. I silently pleaded in my mind for the Sword to return to me when I raised my hand within sight of it, but the Sword never returned. Who was it waiting for?

The homeless population was now estimated to be over 25 million. Every state had hundreds of what people had begun to call "Reaganvilles" after the president who had initiated the social darwinist war against the non-rich. It was ironic, in a way, to name the homeless encampments after the actor president: by the standards of the day, he was a liberal. Much too liberal to ever be nominated as a Republican presidential candidate. President Ryan's latest proposed budget cut was the last remaining vestige of the welfare state: food stamps. Those had survived only because farmers constantly squawked that they didn't want to sell their entire crop to foreign buyers. Homeless people weren't eligible for food stamps because they didn't have addresses. There were lots of things homeless people were ineligible for because they lacked addresses: library cards, voting, government employment, camping permits for national parks, fishing licenses, drivers' licenses, demonstration permits, mail service since general delivery had been eliminated, passports, and state identification cards. If you didn't have an address, you didn't exist.

Detroit wasn't the only city that looked like what I just described. Most of Los Angeles, most of Denver, all of St. Louis, all of Cleveland, Ohio, most of New York City, nearly the entire state of New Jersey, most of Houston, and most of Atlanta were also wastelands. Every city had its abandoned industrial zones. The United States looked like a country that had been invaded and conquered. It had been invaded and conquered in a way: the worshippers of Ayn Rand had progressively restricted voting to the point that only the upper middle class and the rich could vote: about 12 percent of the population. For the rest, the United States was a dictatorship.

There were still pockets of affluence in the United States. Spotless gated areas of mansions, manicured lawns, and upscale boutiques. And Trapwire cameras. Trapwire cameras were the state surveillance cameras that lined the streets in affluent areas and combined with private closed-circuit TV cameras inside private shops and residential homes to create an all-pervasive security zone where someone was always watching and ready to dispatch the police or a SWAT team as necessary. Trapwire created a high-tech police state to protect the assets of the wealthy. Ironically, the areas inhabited by the rich had the best public services in the United States. They even had free libraries. The rich lived in a world apart.

After twenty-five years of robbing grocery stores, I was the most hated woman in the United States. And the most beloved. Newspapers in the wealthy areas recorded all my exploits and the cable news channels featured me nightly as the rich cursed my name with gusto. I could walk into any homeless encampment in the United States utterly without fear and unarmed. The homeless kept up a constant vigil for police infiltrators who were hoping to rid the government of its most wanted terrorist with a single headshot. The homeless had discovered a highly effective method of discouraging the infiltrators: they ate them. If you got caught in a homeless encampment with a police-issued pistol, you were dinner.

There were other changes. Business districts had changed greatly in the past twenty-five years. Fast-food chain restaurants had virtually disappeared. Global climate change turned the states of the Great Plains into desert. The Midwest corn belt became arid grasslands suitable only for the growing of sorghum. Other countries lost valuable farmland as well. The loss of so much farmland that had been dedicated to the growing of corn sent the price of corn, which was the primary feed for beef cattle, soaring. Beef became too expensive for fast food. Chicken soared in price, as well. The only fast food chicken chain that survived was Chick-fil-A which came to be considered fine dining. Where you had once seen hamburger restaurants, you now saw little hole-in-the-wall taco joints which filled their tacos with beans and rice and used fish and meat solely as condiments. Department stores had almost entirely disappeared as well. They now existed solely in the gated areas occupied exclusively by the rich. Elsewhere, discount stores were all that existed. Cheapmart ruled the roost. Most shopping malls were abandoned. Kids had once liked to go exploring in abandoned shopping malls, but it became too dangerous because homeless drug addicts who had been kicked out of regular homeless encampments tended to drift toward the abandoned shopping malls. Even I was a bit afraid of the homeless drug addicts. If you disturbed them, sometimes they would burst out of nowhere and come at you will a filthy syringe. I've killed a few of them who tried to attack me. I considered them too dangerous to leave alive.

On the world scene, untreatable forms of malaria had broken loose in pockets along the Amazon river basin, the Congo river basin, and the Mekong river basin. It wasn't just people dying. It was every living animal, both warm-blooded and cold-blooded. These malaria-infested areas had become death zones with only plants and insects still alive, and they were getting bigger with each passing year.

I shifted a bit on the window ledge of the abandoned hotel. I wanted to jump off and float down to the street, but that was too dangerous in this day and age of drones flying overhead just about everywhere in America. I avoided all open spaces easily visible from the sky. I had learned to think like an animal that always had one eye focused on the sky looking out for hawks. The drones no longer carried just cameras. Some of them were armed. The "War on Terror" was now in its thirty-first year with no end in sight. The drones were also being used in the "War on Drugs." There had been several incidents in which drones fired on automobiles being chased by the police because they were suspected of carrying large amounts of illegal drugs. Did I mention that there had been two cases in which a drone fired on a young woman simply because she looked like me and was dressed like me? Short, freckle-faced redheads had learned never to wear dark blue, knee-length cotton dresses for fear of being mistaken for me. The Department of Homeland Security's target recognition software that scanned all images from Trapwire cameras wasn't as accurate as they had been claiming.

I leaned back into the abandoned hotel room and opened a portal to another abandoned hotel two streets away. I had been there before. I found a window and peered out. Sure enough, off in the distance I saw a glint off some small object flying in the sky. The Defense Department had spent fortunes trying to make the low-flying domestic drones blend into the sky, but they could still be seen. Some of the domestic drones were the size of insects and flew at street level. I decided it was time to leave.

I returned to Wonderland and had my lunch with Bill McGill's crew of brewers. I work afternoons at the brewery making my own recipe of walnut brandy and "period" brandy. It's only a few hours and the time seems to go quickly. It's certainly not like working at a regular job in the world above. Bill never breathes down my neck, and no one worries about productivity. We don't produce for profit, and there are no books to keep. We produce for our fellow residents of Wonderland, and trade the surplus in the world above for a few items that we can't produce. "Old Bill's Brandy" is a favorite black-market item among the rich in the world above.

After my shift, I was free for the evening, and returned to my drifting in the ruins of Detroit. Just outside of Detroit's border, I saw a new completed prison. Just what the country needed. More jailbirds. Most of the country's prisoners were drug users and shoplifters. Non-violent offenders. Other countries -- civilized countries -- might have dealt with drug abuse and shoplifting with referral to social service agencies. The proud, self-righteous U.S.A. just locked them up. There were several states with "Three Strikes Laws" that would put a person in prison for life for three shoplifting offenses. In 2032, the United States had about 21 million people in jail. We had more people in prison at one moment than the entire number of people who had passed through Stalin's Gulag during the entire time of its existence. The Republicans saw nothing wrong with this, although they did occasionally grumble about the cost of the contracts with the private prison corporations that housed most of America's unfortunate jailbirds. Some Baptist ministers in the South occasionally wondered aloud how many of America's governing officials held stock in the private prison corporations. "Are some politicians promoting tough-on-crime legislation because more prisoners equals more profits and more dividends in their own pockets?" Prisons were like wars: the country never seemed to run out of money for them.

I had been leading homeless people in middle-of-the-night grocery store ransackings for basic necessities for around twenty-five years. It was intended as a form of political protest against government indifference to inequality. Not one piece of legislation, not one reform, not even a raise in the minimum wage had been passed in response. In 2024, when Republican voter restrictions finally achieved their aim of pushing the Democrats down into the status of a third party, the Republicans and Libertarians joined to eliminate the minimum wage. It was their idea of a jobs program. It didn't work out the way the economists said it would. The lack of purchasing power on the part of so many people who had jobs helped to push the economy down even further. Businesses need customers. It was that simple. It became obvious that above-market minimum wages were, if anything, providing a small boost to the economy. That's when the prison population and number of homeless people really exploded. That's also when I started to appreciate the foresight of the National Rifle Association that had rabidly resisted any restrictions on gun ownership. 

Every large homeless encampment in the country had at least 100 hunting rifles, and a fair number of nasty semi-automatic pistols. There were usually a few old machine guns floating around, as well. I even saw an old Soviet AK-47. The police were afraid to enter homeless encampments because the residents were so heavily armed. There had been several well-publicized shootouts between homeless encampments and police squads attempting to evict them. Thus homeless encampments in 2032 were, for the most part, left alone by police departments. Elected officials had finally decided that the trouble of evicting homeless people from vacant, unused public property such as riversides, and from abandoned industrial zones was not worth the trouble. Meanwhile, deep-down-inside, I had started to question the point of peaceful protest because it had produced nothing positive for twenty-five years. All those guns floating around in the homeless encampments were starting to give me ideas. Terrifying, possibly immoral ideas. I wasn't so sure about right and wrong anymore. Black and white, good and evil, justice, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, citizenship. It had all started to melt in my mind into a terrifying glaze of gray and bright, red blood. Could revolution be justified when the result was likely to be a mass slaughter of innocents?

I went home to sleep for awhile before I started on the night's planned raids.

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End of Chapter 1

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This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.

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Version 3


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